Winter Blues

No, not that kind, well ok maybe a little of that kind too

Late afternoon. That time of day in-between: not quite sunset but no longer the high arc of afternoon with its sharp light and crisp shadows. It is a time between, and the world is turning blue.

On days like this, winter days with snow enough to erase the imperfections of the landscape and a sky as cloudless as new ice, that blue seems to rise from below like exhaled breath. It drifts as weightless water into the low spots, the valleys and dips first, pooling there, before spreading out in a lengthening of shadows as the sunlight falls. “Blue Hour” photographers call it. It rises to become more than light, a kind of subject in itself wherein the whole earth glows like the paintings of the Luminists movement, each scene lit from within. A reminder of the artistic sensibilities of light and the performances that are given even if there is no audience to appreciate its beauty.

To me, that blue light of winter days has always seemed a kind of magic. As I hike a shoreline retracing my steps back to the car, I imagine the alchemists who were once said to work at distilling moonlight by swirling it in immense silver bowls trying to capture this light in those same bowls, whipping it into a kind of sweet confectionary to lay upon the tongue. It is not just air and not just light but something of both. I think of the Lawrence Raab poem “The Invisible Object”:

Held toward light

in the shape of your hands

it’s clearer than water,

clearer than glass,

than air.

It holds nothing back.”

Science will use terms like “Rayleigh Scattering”: the low angle of the sun, the many-colored wavelengths of that low-angled sun’s light scattered through the prism of cold, dry winter air with the short wavelengthed blue waves scattering the most. That same cold, dry air makes winter sunsets particularly vibrant and snow, especially deep, packed snow, scattering all that light and weaving its deep blue color, windblown patches left gleaming like snowdrifts with blue eyes.

Maybe it is the low angle of the light, or the loneliness of winter days, but there is always, to me, a touch of sadness in that blue light, the slow ache of distance. It is that certain slant of light. The sun hits just so, illuminating corners that can, most of the time, remain safely in the shadows, raising sometimes prickly questions that have gone not only unanswered but too often unasked.

That light comes in the late afternoon, most often deep winter. The first shadows pooling in the foreground signaling the slow slide into evening. What has been accomplished that day, is done. What remains undone may never see completion. It is all there, in that certain slant of light that just seems to pierce the heart. Call it the angle of regret.

Or the angle of beauty depending upon your turn of mind. Can it be both? Perhaps all deep beauty is tinged with the edge of sadness and a longing for light, a memory of those winter days when brightness has seemingly seeped from our lives and we long for “pecan pie kissed with beach salt/ or a field of dandelions distilled” as in this poem by Matt Welter who once worked at the Raspberry Island Lighthouse:

• S.A.D. Cure

  for Seasonal Affective Disorder

  I wish that I could feed you sunshine

  pecan pie kissed with beach salt

  or a field of dandelions distilled.

  Perhaps a Thai curry soup, or

  summer squash and sweet corn

  served with autumn shot venison.

  Arnica and buttercup and goldenrod

  stored as warm fat, warm coat

  and muscle that runs in a white flash.

  Let me rub your cheeks with desert oils

  hot and flush as pack rats mating.

  Let me burn kerosene and honey candles

  vigilant to the Celtic bonfires of Yule.

  Let me open up the sky for you

  to count sunbeams like birthday candles.

  Together we shall wish for the return

  of buzzing bees and fresh chlorophyll,

  of stretching days and blazing sun.

  -- Matt Welter

  

  In the blue hours of these late winter afternoons, I think of that poem, of the slow dance of returning light, of the alchemy of sun and cold and sky. We are gaining sunlight now at the pace of more than three minutes a day, over 70 minutes just this month. Its touch is longer and more sensual on the side of your face as you hike the shoreline home. That thought, and that light, is company of a kind on these long hikes.

  But it is still winter. Near the water’s edge, I bend down, break off a piece of ice like frozen light, and slide it in my mouth, melting it slowly on my tongue on the long walk home.

— Jeff Rennicke (all photography by the author unless otherwise noted)